An email from a ghost

Exactly a month ago I received an email from a man in America. The email opened without salutation: the writer merely said that he loved my blog, and was passing it on to others, a statement guaranteed to make me feel warmly towards him, whoever he might be. He then went on to say ‘I need some information you might know something about’.

What, I wondered, might that be?

The next paragraph made my jaw drop: I was stunned.

‘My father's family was from Aivali. His father was a physician at the hospital there. Is there a way to find out where the Emmanouil Paraschos  (Εμμανουήλ Παράσχος) family lived until 1922?’

 

I live in a town full of ghosts. The Greeks who lived here until 1922 hover constantly at the edge of one’s vision, a shadow population peering from the empty windows of  ruined houses, and only ever glimpsed in the few photographs* that remain of life here a hundred years ago:  middle class couples, like the one above,  in a formal pose for the photographer, confident of their place in the world; families in their Sunday best ready to attend mass at the Greek Orthodox churches that now have minarets attached;

children lining up in solemn-faced rows for school photographs;

and a young girl  in a white dress, gazing calmly into the future, unaware that her childhood was about to come to an end and that her adult life, if she survived the coming catastrophe, would be lived in another country:

The disjunction between those sad spectres of the past and the town in which I live has always seemed complete; when I talk to people who live here now about their family backgrounds, they tell me that their grandparents and great grandparents came here from Salonika, or Mytilene, or Crete. There is literally no one in Ayvalik today whose ancestors were here before 1923. They are gone, lost to history, and can never come back.

Yet when I read the email from the professor in Boston, a man called Manny Paraschos  named, it seemed,  for his grandfather, it was as if someone had suddenly stepped straight out of one of those old photographs, waving, and shouting ‘Hey! We’re still here!’ 

I had received an email from a ghost.

When I started writing this blog, I imagined its possible readers as people like me: interested in, but largely ignorant of,  both modern Turkey and the many previous civilisations and empires which rose and fell, flourished and  faded, during the last 9,000 thousand years in Asia Minor. It simply never occurred to me that the blog would be read by anyone in the diaspora of Asia Minor Greeks.

I wrote back to the professor immediately, expressing my delight at making a connection to someone now living who had his roots in that lost world, and offering to help him in any way I could in the quest to identify his ancestral home. If he had no address for the Paraschos family house, as was implied by his question, then I would try to approach the problem from another angle: I knew that population censuses list the names of all the people living at any given address, so if there were any pre-1922 census records for Ayvalik still extant, I could search them to find any mention of the  name  ‘Paraschos’.

Another possibility might be the Property Records Office of the Ayvalik municipality. My own house was built in 1908, only 14 years before the Greeks left, so I imagined it might only ever have been occupied by one family, and I remembered a friend telling me that if I wanted to find out who used to live in my house, I might be able to do so at the Property Records Office, where the land registration deed should record the name of the house’s first owner. Without an address, it would be more difficult, but it was possible that the details from land deeds had been computerised, and one might be able to search by name, rather than address.

I outlined these possibilities, both of which  seemed to offer at least some slim chance of success, to Manny, and undertook to discuss the problem with a Turkish friend here, who has a strong interest in, and considerable knowledge of, local history. However, not wishing to get his hopes up too high, I added the following caveat: that many records had been destroyed during the cataclysmic events in Anatolia between 1919 and 1923, and that even if we could manage to find  the address where the Paraschos family lived, the house might be a ruin, or have disappeared completely and been replaced by a new building. I would do my best to help him find his family home, but  was, in truth, doubtful of a successful outcome.

Still, it was a fascinating quest, and I was determined to try. I arranged to have lunch the next day with the friend who might be able to advise me on my search, and bought a new notebook, on the basis that all great –or even small – enterprises should begin with a new notebook and a Pilot pen with a very, very fine point.

Project Paraschos was now officially underway.

(to be continued)

* Please note that these photographs of  Greek families in Ayvalik before 1922, from publicly available sources, are not of the Paraschos family.